Subject: Re: Conference moment: Lisp certification?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 03 Nov 2002 23:48:25 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3245356105286497@naggum.no>
* Harald Hanche-Olsen
| This is probably equivalent to a system in which every voter has a fixed
| number of (positive) points to distribute among candidates as he wishes:
| Just add a constant to the points awarded by each voter in your system to
| see this.
Not quite. There are two differences. The first is what the absence of
a vote means. In a system with negative scores, absence means zero. In
a system with a skewed scale, absence of votes is generally not tolerated
and voters have to give scores to every candidate. This is known to fail
miserably because once you ask people to rate things below the "don't
care" limit, their score values are completely random. It is therefore
important to let voters decide not to score a particular candidate, and
that the system give such a zero value, which is the second difference.
The Borda system, which gives more points to the most values and zero to
the least valued specifically requires that each candidate gets scored.
| Such systems are prone the same kind of paradoxes that plague all the
| more conventional systems in existence.
The no-vote-means-zero-score rule removes a significant number of
problems, but not all.
| Anyway, I think a better way to achieve what you want (though not paradox
| free - no fair voting system can be paradox free) is the single
| transferrable vote. Each voter ranks all candidates.
This is a huge problem. Voters must be allowed /not to care/ about the
relative ranking of candidates on whom they have no opinion. Forcing
voters to care about these candidates is known to produce lots of noise.
Is this article you have read? http://www.sciencenews.org/20021102/bob8.asp
--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.